Like many others, I find myself challenged by the scale of the task to help transform business practice and bring a healthy, more caring and inclusive value system into being. My mind takes up the task of course. It calculates probabilities and strategies, seeks evidence for its arguments, begins to form imagined alliances. Then sometimes it can’t see enough and grinds to a halt… stares up at the implacable mountain face of 'BUSINESS AS USUAL’, governed by its rationales of self-interest, endless growth and profit at any cost. I know this place.
I also know that change doesn’t happen by knowledge and will power alone.
In fact, if I am approaching change from a place of personal will, I know that I am still part of the problem. I’ve become identified with a role… as hero, or rescuer, or fixer. Naturally, the role helps me feel useful and valuable, and it helps keep creeping doubt at bay. After all, it’s not easy or comfortable to feel powerless and admit the limits of my individual knowledge, or the degree of mental and emotional conditioning.
Yet the recognition of my limits can, and does, act as a wake up. It acts as a doorway, through unknowing to fuller awareness.
So I stop, take a breath, gather myself and reconnect to the sources of life and a deeper creativity. I remember to pivot right there in that moment. Not as a one-time action, but as a choice, made over and over again. My task is to keep pivoting and practice moving out of this rather ‘conditioned me’ into a more expanded ‘connected me’, able to use all of her intelligences and different tools of consciousness.
I pivot as soon as I recognise that I’m operating in far too limited an awareness. (It’s beautiful hubris to think I have the ‘right answer’ but it’s simply not the truth). When I can let go of an opinion, position, desired outcome, or belief, then I’m open again to the largest field of potential and I’m receptive to new possibilities, as yet unseen and uncreated.
Pivoting the self is an immediate, here-and-now practice. It allows me to return to states of generative flow and to stop struggling, willing or forcing things. Growth is not a driven act of will, or a destination. It’s a continual movement back and forth across a dynamic threshold, as we learn to inhabit new dimensions of reality and increase our capacity to move between the concrete everyday and the boundless.
I practice pivoting by challenging everything that blocks the full creative potential of every moment and by illuminating my blind spots and beliefs. In this way, there are countless small shifts of awareness that re-pattern my inner and outer perception. Like stepping-stones, each one creates and expands potential, leading to a more unified and coherent reality.
Some discoveries are ground shaking in nature, and they expose and collapse large pieces of my self-image. Together, all of these shifts in perception and understanding, large and small, create a deeper pivot in identity. Inner transformation leads to outer change. Our world is reshaped as we turn insights into reality through our choices and embodied actions.
Knowing through direct experience that I live in an interconnected universe that is endlessly intelligent - makes all the difference. I don't have to operate in a narrow band of mostly conditioned awareness. I can actively and consciously participate, by helping to surface hidden and unexpected data. Helping to shape life by generating solutions that are based on this understanding.
I am, and you are deeply a part of this evolutionary movement and our conscious agency is a purposeful gift.
I don’t need to challenge the current paradigm of business and leadership. It has already revealed its own limits. There is, in fact, no mountain face to tackle because business leadership and culture are in the process of pivoting too, and ultimately we all stand on the same ground.
There is nothing here to force or to will. I'm not limited to the lenses of my personal reality. Instead, there is the joy and blessing of being here at this threshold moment in human history with a values framework we have co-created to support leaders who are choosing to pivot too. We bring our lived experience and our service to you, seeking to make an intentional and conscious positive impact to help you in your work.